December 17, 2004

Progress toward incorporating molecules as the active components in electronic circuitry has advanced rapidly over the past five years. Caltech professor James Heath describes the progress as “real and rapid” in the Dec. 17 issue of the journal Science.

“We have published 64-bit random access memory circuits using bistable rotaxane molecules as the memory elements, and we are in the process of fabricating a 16-kilobit memory circuit at a… read more

December 16, 2004

Researchers have announced a technique to record a three-dimensional image of the orbitals of electrons in molecules.

The imaging technique uses extremely short laser pulses to briefly ionize an electron away from a molecule of nitrogen. As they spring back, the electrons emit light that can interfere with the laser pulse in different ways depending on the electron’s position and where the laser pulse hit the molecule.

December 15, 2004

University of California at Riverside researchers used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) as a nanoscale actuator to individually guide molecules one at a time and step-by-step through a chemical reaction.

Their technique fine-tunes the reactivity of groups of molecules, offering a way to optimize atomic-scale construction of complex molecules on surfaces.

In 2000, researchers found that the STM could assemble individual biphenyl molecules from elementary… read more

December 15, 2004

One of five known DNA-repair mechanisms in cells has been completely analyzed and reconstituted in a test tube by an international collaboration of researchers led by scientists from the Keck School of Medicine.

The team is the first to reconstitute this pathway, known as the nonhomologous end joining pathway, or NHEJ, and NHEJ is only the third repair pathway to be reconstituted in the laboratory.

December 14, 2004

MIT researchers have grown a tissue patch that could repair damaged hearts, using electric signals that mimic a heartbeat to force single cardiac cells to develop into tissue similar to that of the native heart.

They attached rat cardiac cells to a three-dimensional collagen scaffold and then zapped the cells with electrical pulses modeled on a rat heartbeat for several days, inducing the cells to grow into beating patches… read more

December 14, 2004

Data has been sent across a wide-area optical network at 101Gbit/sec., the fastest-ever sustained data transmission speed, equivalent to downloading three full DVD movies per second, or transmitting all of the content of the Library of
Congress in 15 minutes.

It was demonstrated by a High Energy Physics research team that included the California Institute of Technology, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratories (FNAL).… read more

December 14, 2004

Google plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation’s leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

Google plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in Stanford University’s collection and the seven million at the University of Michigan.

The goal is to create a digital card catalog and searchable… read more

December 13, 2004

Researchers using diffusion tensor (DT) MRI have found a third area of the human brain, dubbed “Geschwind’s territory,” that is part of human language circuits along with Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.

“There are clues that the parallel pathway network we found is important for the acquisition of language in childhood,” said Marco Catani, M.D., from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. “Geschwind’s territory is the last area… read more